The conviction of neonatal nurse Lucy Letby for the murder of seven babies at a hospital in the historic English city of Chester has highlighted the dangers posed by medical staff who mask their homicidal impulses.
Ms. Letby, 33, has yet to be sentenced will likely spend the majority of her life behind bars after being convicted on Aug. 18 after a nine-month trial at Manchester Crown Court.
The motivation for Ms. Letby’s crimes was not outlined by the prosecution but The Epoch Times has spoken to two experts who say the case has all the classic symptoms of Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSbP), where a parent or carer makes a child in their care ill or, in extreme cases, causes their death in order to get attention.
Ms. Letby’s crimes have echoes of the case of Beverley Allitt—dubbed the “Angel of Death” by the tabloid press—who was jailed for a minimum of 30 years in 2007 for murdering four children and attacking nine others at a hospital in Lincolnshire.
Ms. Allitt had injected her victims with insulin—one of the methods used by Ms. Letby—and was later diagnosed as suffering from MSbP.
Social Media ‘Fuel to the Flame’
Detective Mike Weber, from Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office in Texas, is one of the world’s leading experts on MSbP and he says the internet and social media have likely increased the rate of offending.Mr. Weber said MSbP was driven by an “attention-seeking element” and he said: “What in today’s society is attention-seeking? Social media maybe?”
“Social media has really been the fuel to the flame for this abuse. In one case I investigated the offender didn’t really have real friends in life. Her entire life was spent on social media. She basically did the abuse for social media likes,” Mr. Weber told The Epoch Times.
He said: “If you’re going to commit this abuse in 1992, to present a false medical history to get a doctor to make a certain diagnosis, what would you have to do? You'd have to go to a library and put in a tonne of work, right? Now what do you have to do? It’s an easy Google search, five minutes and you got every everything you need to present to a doctor, you know the symptoms you need to present.”
Ms. Hope told The Epoch Times: “This abuse is very insidious. It’s really hard to diagnose, and oftentimes people who are committing this abuse have high regard in their community and are seen as really nice, kind, loving, and caring and all these attributes that are clearly very different than what is seen when the abuse is occurring, which can make it really confusing and hard to diagnose.”
Lucy Letby Case ‘Should Have Raised Red Flags’
Ms. Hope, who is studying for a bachelor’s degree in social work, said Ms. Letby’s case should have raised several red flags.“It was clear that there was a lot of things that she described that were different from what anybody else had observed. And that’s usually a pretty big red flag that people look for,” said Ms. Hope.
But she said: “Systems aren’t built for this type of abuse. They don’t understand Munchausen by proxy. Most people haven’t heard of Munchausen by proxy. There’s no training that’s done for law enforcement or for child protection services, or for nurses and doctors, to be able to properly investigate this abuse.”
Ms. Hope said: “Nobody wants to look at mothers as someone that could be trying to kill their child ... and that’s the same for nurses. Nobody wants to look at someone that’s in a helping profession as someone that’s trying to purposefully kill children.”
She said: “The prevalence rate supposedly is 1 percent. However, if you ask any expert in the field or anyone that works in the field, everyone agrees that is not representative of the actual reality of it all.”
Ms. Hope said under-reporting means most cases never get a full diagnosis.
“It’s estimated that up to 10 percent of victims die, and so those cases are going go unreported most of the time, and then a lot of survivors don’t realise that this is the abuse that they went through, most likely ever. And so it’s really hard to say how common it actually is,” she added.
Ms. Hope said: “A lot of these abusers tend to have narcissistic personality traits or antisocial personality traits or psychopathic traits, where people may not show or exhibit emotion unless it’s for a manipulation tactic, and show no remorse. There’s a lot of times where the abuser might start to believe the stories they’re telling and kind of like blank out what they’re actually doing.”
Banal Text Messages While Plotting Murder
When Ms. Letby gave evidence at her trial in July her barrister, Ben Myers, KC, highlighted the incongruity of the allegations against her with the text messages she shared with friends about “Love Island,” celebrities, and going on holiday to Ibiza.Mr. Myers asked Ms. Letby: “And in the middle of that, were you planning to kill babies? That’s what the prosecution say.”
“That didn’t happen,” Ms. Letby replied.
So what could explain an apparently kindhearted nurse—who lived an ordinary existence swapping banal WhatsApp messages with friends and colleagues about reality television and her holiday plans—being at the same time a coldhearted killer who broke the hearts of a string of parents when she murdered or tried to kill their babies?
Mr. Weber said the syndrome was widely misunderstood, with people wrongly thinking it was a mental illness.
Mr. Weber told The Epoch Times: “There’s numerous commonalities between this abuse and paedophilia. There’s a compulsion to commit the abuse. It overrides any fear of consequences, and usually in this abuse, consequences rarely happen.”
He said in many cases perpetrators with MSbP would present as loving parents or caring professionals and he said when accusations were made against them their friends and colleagues would often come to their defence.
When suspicions about Ms. Letby were first raised and she was moved to an administrative, non-nursing job in the hospital, she filed a workplace grievance.
This did not surprise Mr. Weber, who said it was common for MSbP offenders to claim innocence.
Munchausen by Proxy Offenders ‘Extremely Manipulative’
“What I’ve seen with mothers, they will rally home-schooling groups, they'll rally their church groups. We’ve had entire church congregations show up in court backing these offenders because they just don’t believe that they can do something like this. But these offenders are extremely manipulative,” he added.When Ms. Letby was first charged, someone—it is not clear if it was one of her colleagues or a friend—launched a website called LucyLetby.com on which they defended her and appeared to blame staff shortages and flaws in hospital management for the deaths.
The website proclaimed Ms. Letby was “innocent” and suggested she was a “convenient patsy” and a scapegoat.
For years Ms. Jones claimed she had been wrongfully convicted, until she eventually confessed.
Mr. Weber said, “Very few of these offenders are ever able to admit their full course of conduct.”
Tarrant County—which has a population of around 2 million and covers the cities of Fort Worth and Arlington as well as a children’s hospital—is leading the way in prosecuting MSbP cases, thanks to Mr. Weber.
He has interrogated several MSbP offenders—usually mothers—and he says their response is almost identical.
“They'll lie initially. And then when I give them some facts from my investigation that expose their lies and make it known to them that I’m not going to let them get away with that, they will then change their story to try to conform to the facts that I’ve given them. Then I may eventually get admissions from them, but I will never get a full confession. And that’s just about all I can say; I rarely get a full confession,” Mr. Weber said.
Detective Superintendent Paul Hughes, the senior investigating officer in the Letby case, said MSbP had been considered as an explanation for her motive.
He said: “Obviously she’s an attention seeker but I don’t know, it could be. Ultimately, the only person who can answer the question ‘why?’ is Lucy Letby herself. I don’t think we’ll ever know unless she chooses to tell us.”
